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[ENGLISH] Monstrous Wounds, Monstrous Growths scrap
by Eunice Lee
June 9, 2026
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Phantom Limbs
If poetry, in the words of John Stuart Mill, is “over-heard speech,” Lee Min-ha’s Phantom Limbs is a frightening collection of overheard overhearings, spells conjuring the phantoms of phantoms. In Jein Han’s masterful English translation, the poem “Narrow Door” catches its speaker in an eerie moment of eavesdropping:
Trapped outside the door
I hoist my ears, large as houses, until the day breaks
The birds that woke before me are like fists
that clench their beaks and knock on eardrums
Here is a poem, and a subversive poetics, where the speaker shrinks under the grotesque weight of their own “ears, large as houses”; where even the “birds,” instead of singing, tighten like “fists” striking down readerly expectations of conventional odes; where the phantom of speech—the conversation taking place behind this door, implied but never disclosed—replaces speech itself.
Phantom Limbs abounds with doors closed against the obvious, and open toward mystery, horror, and refusal. This book is bookended by a set of ironic, Magritte-inspired door poems: one rectangle that reads, “THIS IS NOT A DOOR”; another that reads, “HANDS OFF.” Objects take on such flippant personas, while human characters are often stripped of their subjecthood: “wrists [are] stamped with a barcode”; women go missing; a father reminisces how “the daughter’s neck used to fold up nicely into portable sizes.” Even the poet herself appears as her elusive humanoid double, “Mannequin M.”
Alongside such moments of objectification—and the radical decentering of the first-person “I”—disembodied eyes recur throughout Phantom Limbs. Eyes no longer see, but are seen; they are admired like art objects: “You with your glasses off, your onion eyes are easy on my eyes,” reads a memorable refrain. Eyes are also maimed, screwed on, and gouged out. There is “an old man who endlessly pulls chains out from the furnace of his two eyes”; an insomniac with “empty eyeholes [ . . . ] buried under shoveled time”; “a cave where we have no eyes left to lose.”
Imagining both harvested organs and their phantoms, Lee gestures toward exploitative realities in which one must “settle the payment with parcels of [one’s] body.” Violent yet potent, images of removed body parts also give visual form to Lee’s argument, in the manifesto-like prose poem “Talk-show,” that “Poetry is born in the absence of poetry.” In the absence of reality, the surreal grows monstrous appendages: the title poem “Phantom Limbs” follows a mannequin “click-clack[ing]” its way through a perilous urban landscape; suddenly, “Two arms shoot out of its forehead and scatter in the air.”
While carrying the wounds of dismemberment, this collection is also incredibly funny. Lee is most humorous when the unadorned mundane interrupts her fantastical journeys. For a title so whimsical as “Lizard Tails Dangling on a Coat Hanger Watch a Woman in a Green Dress,” one does not expect a first line like “She peels an apple.” Another poem opens with the comically normal line, “The man fastens the gas valves shut.” It is this matter-of-fact voice that also highlights the absurd: “Why don’t you wedge yourself between the mirror and the glass pane,” asks the speaker in the very first line of “Mirror Game.” No explanation, only this baffling command delivered with a straight face.
Readers may also hear the incredible musicality of Han’s translation. When the poem “H” was released in Black Sun Lit (April 2022), readers were already enchanted by Han’s rendition of the alliterative wordplay using poet Lee Min-ha’s initials (“m” and “h”). Han seamlessly assembles the words “mortal,” “morning,” “hyoid,” and “heaven,” preserving both the sense and the sounds. The translation conjures additional resonances between different senses of an English word: “the horn on my ear” is a hard protrusion, but also evokes the audible horn; throughout “Photo Game,” the verb “shoot” evokes both the visual craft and the violence that is so important to Lee’s body horror.
The translation’s acoustics are not only creative, but also accurate. Han closely replicates the barreling rhythm of Lee’s prose poems, in such lines as, “They verify whether the vestiges of laughter are correctly rustling like grains of salt before turning into smoke to slip out the window crack.” (And notice those v’s, s’s, and r’s!) Han’s translation of “-neunde, (는데,)” to “but then,” perfectly captures both the suspense and the sonic linger of the original grammatical particle. True to the music of the Korean language, and true to the spirit of Lee Min-ha’s wild imaginations, Phantom Limbs in Jein Han’s translation is easy on the eyes and easy on the ears, a perfect poetic seance for those eager to be frightened and haunted.
Writer 필자 소개
Eunice Lee
Eunice Lee is a translator, poet, and researcher. Her translation of Kim Myeong-sun’s Fruit of Life: Poems will be published by Rutgers University Press.
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